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Comment by citizenpaul

1 day ago

I've seen BEAM mentioned several times on here in the last few months. Is there some sort of thing going on with erlang that I'm out of the loop on?

7 comments

citizenpaul

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arcanemachiner  1 day ago

Erlang/BEAM/Elixir stuff shows up on the front page of Hacker News pretty often, I'd say at least once per month.

Elixir was a HN darling a few years back. Publicity has somewhat waned since then.

To answer your question, I would say "no", that no particularly interesting things have emerged from that community lately. Just more stuff happened to make it to the front page. (That is not to say anything bad of the BEAM community, just that I see nothing particularly outstanding of late which would warrant such a claim.)

I would say the most recent newsworthy events would include:

- The Erlang `:ssh` module had a serious CVE that required an immediate upgrade for anyone using it.

- Gleam, a BEAM language with static typing, had a v1.0 release.

- Phoenix LiveView also reached v1.0.

- Elixir is making steady progress on the implementation of a static type system, using a novel "set theoretic" type system.

Overall, I would say that the ecosystem as a whole is progressing slowly but steadily.

  • travisgriggs  20 hours ago

    > is progressing slowly but steadily

    This is one of the things that has made me like Elixir so much. Every time I update my Android or Apple apps with a few months in between, I have to figure out what things they've thrown in the language now.

    The Elixir community seems to be less in search of "what's the hot programmer item that we have to have this week" and instead be more at peace with it's simple approach to computing, and just work off of that.

    Slow and Steady is nice these days; better than Hot and Volatile.

  • kamilap  4 hours ago

    + both Gleam and Elixir were in top 3 most admired langs in the latest SO survey, adds to the hype

  • Towaway69  1 day ago

    There is Erlang-Red[1] that is bring a visual flow based programming approach to Erlang.

    That’s something new in the Erlang world.

    [1] = https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red

    • no_wizard  21 hours ago

      Neat project, and I think erlang (or its offshoots, like elixir) are great candidates for this sort of thing.

      That said, I take issue with this:

      >is great for creating data flows that actually describe concurrent processing, it is just a shame the NodeJS is single threaded

      Its not really true, there are `worker_threads`[0] as well as a cluster process module[1] for multi processing.

      The nodejs runtime has really come a long way here. Though, it is true that by default, its single threaded, and one could argue, and I'd agree with it, that its much easier to do multi process / multi threaded work on the BEAM since it was built with this in mind from the get go.

      Never the less, its not so true that NodeJS is limited to a single thread!

      [0]: https://nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html

      [1]: https://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html

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